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The opposition in Belarus rejected the official election results, giving President Alexander Lukashenko a crushing victory in re-election on Monday, saying the vote was manipulated and that the talks begin over a nonviolent power movement.
Previously, the Central Electoral Commission said Lukashenko, in force for more than a quarter of a century, won 80% of the vote in Sunday’s elections, while Svetlana Tikhanouskaya, who emerged from darkness in front of his main rival, won only 9.9%.
“The government doesn’t pay attention to us. The government wants to think of nonviolent tactics to hand over power,” said Tikhanouskaya, a former English instructor who entered the race after her blogger husband’s imprisonment.
“Of course, we don’t recognize the results.”
Foreign observers have ruled that elections have been free and fair in Belarus since 1995, and the pre-voting era saw the government imprison Lukashenko’s rivals and open criminal investigations into others they opposed.
Events are being heavily watched across Russia, whose oil exports pass through Belarus to the West and which has long regarded the country as a buffer zone opposed to NATO, and the West, which has tried to reach Minsk from Moscow’s orbit.
The streets of the capital and other towns were quiet after Sunday night’s violence, when police used force to disperse thousands of protesters who had accumulated to denounce what they saw as an electoral farce.
Tikhanouskaya said she saw herself as the winner of the election. She said the ballot had been massively manipulated.
Its electoral rallies have attracted some of the crowds since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The opposition now holds a vote count at polling stations where there were problems, their advisers said, adding that protests that turned to blood on Sunday would continue.
They said they were in a position to contact the authorities.
Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm manager who has ruled Belarus since 1994, will not react quickly to this offer. Once dubbed Europe’s last dictator across Washington, he faces his greatest challenge in years to maintain control of the force amid discontent with his manipulation. . COVID-19 and human rights violations.
But Lukashenko noted that he would resign.
“The answer will be appropriate. We will not let the country tear,” the 65-year-old said through the Belta news agency.
Lukashenko repeated accusations that hard-to-understand forces sought to manipulate the protesters he called “sheep” to overthrow him, which he said he would never allow.
“They must orchestrate the chaos,” Lukashenko said. “But I have already warned you: there will be no revolution.”
The EU’s foreign policy leader and his commissioner said the elections were marked by “disproportionate and unacceptable state violence opposed to nonviolent protesters.”
“We condemned the violence and called for the prompt delivery of all (the) detainees last night,” Josep Borrell and Oliver Varhelyi said in a joint statement.
A spokesman for Germany’s Foreign Ministry said there were signs of voter fraud and that the EU was discussing how to react.
Neighbouring Poland has said it needs a special EU summit on Belarus. Russian news firm RIA quoted the Belarusian Interior Ministry as saying police had arrested some 3,000 more people in post-election protests.
Human rights teams say more than 1,300 more people were also arrested in pre-election repression, adding independent election observers and members of the Tikhanouskaya crusade team.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, however, congratulated Lukashenko on his victory, as did Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said he hoped the Belarusian leader would deepen ties to Moscow, something Lukashenko has resisted in recent times.
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